Saturday, May 31, 2014

Our inherently static nature

In the last post, I was discussing how the mechanical mind has no sensitivity, no feeling.

The mechanical mind isn't anything more than a set of gears that mesh and interact. Its working is intricate, but the results are absolutely as predictable as a computer — and it has about as much as intelligence as a computer, that is to say, none. All of the intelligence that can drive the mechanical mind comes from outside it, from a part of us called intellect, which is connected to the soul.

As such, the mechanical mind is capable of extremely complex operations, and, based on the data it takes in and learns from, will produce consistent and inevitable results from that data, according to the arrangements made in it. There isn't, however, any intelligence behind it: it produces absolutely nothing more than what its machine function dictates. One would think we would have understood this much better now that we have spent so many decades interacting with computers, but it isn't the case.

One of the interesting products of the mechanical mind is the construction of the future; in ancient times, the Zen masters referred to this as the working of the conceptual mind.

The future that the mechanical mind constructs is based strictly on the data it has already taken in, and complicated interactions that produce predictions of a future based on that data. It extrapolates. It has absolutely no flexibility, because it's incapable of understanding anything that lies outside its data set. It functions, broadly speaking, on a bell curve model; taking in what it knows of the world, it averages it out and attempts to produce a construction that predicts the future.

Nicholas Taleb produced several interesting books on how deeply misguided this kind of model is (The Black Swan and Antifragile); yet we don't see how that applies to our inner world, not quite, anyway, although he attempts to touch on this.

The point is that our construction of the future using a conceptual mind, which is an absolutely habitual thing for all of us, is a fragile circumstance; that is to say, it is a grand construction with no flexibility that is subject to certain breakage the instant it encounters anything that lies outside its range of experience. Persons, businesses, and societies have all collapsed because of this tendency to crystallize the products of the mind into inflexible entities based on assumptions drawn from existing data. The actual intellect — the part that exists aside from the mechanical mind — is a much more flexible entity that is always designed to respond to the now, spontaneously, and with sensitivity, not according to a predetermined set of data.

We all construct futures that are impossible and can never happen; and in fact, we live our whole lives like this, every day, all day long. But we don't realize it; and we don't examine it carefully. It's only like a huge shock — in my own personal case, the death of my sister, or, in the case of the society, an event like 9/11 — that hammers home the point that our mind is a machine, that it produces crystallized, fragile, breakable futures — and that it is supremely unsuited for the actual requirements of life, that is, it has no sensitivity and is unable to construct intelligent responses to these things. This is why we are left aghast when disasters that lie outside our range of experience strike.

This is what intuition is all about — a connection with the feeling part of the mind, which has all of the intelligence, creativity, and flexibility so lacking in the machine we use to conduct most of our business.

Contact with the inner essence, the part of the being that receives the divine inflow of higher energy, can help the intellect and the soul develop so that sensitivity and feeling begin to intersect with the machine. In this case, the flexible entity that is capable of dealing with life is more present; and in this way, we acquire what is called freedom.

Freedom, in other words, is exactly what both Mme. de Salzmann and Meister Eckhart characterized it as: a form of detachment—not from objects, events, circumstances, and conditions, which have an objective reality that we must encounter—but from the inner construction which handles them, the mechanical mind, which we are so deeply invested in.

It is, in other words, not the objects, events, circumstances, and conditions which are the problem, it is our conceptual framework for them, which is static.

The problem becomes obvious to any analytic thinker if we note that objects, events, circumstances, and conditions are inevitably dynamic, whereas a fixed entity with a limited range of responses and gears has an inherently static nature.

It is this inherently static nature, which Gurdjieff referred to as crystallization, that becomes the issue.

1 comment:

"The solution to a problem can never be found within the perimeter of the problem"

This is almost a synonym to the concept embedded in your post today. A machine cannot do what a machine cannot do, and that is the impossibility of conjecture about the future with only the information already installed. I'm with you 100%. Since we are taught that we are third force blind, can the 'Intuition' you speak of provide the input we are missing?

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Recommendations and current reading list

Lee's current reading list (all recommended)

The Iceberg- Marion Coutts. This extraordinary book deserves to be read by every individual engaged in an inner search. The questions it raises about life, death, and relationship are framed by the authors responsibilities to her very young child and her dying husband. This is a book about real work in life, not esoteric theory.

Far From The Tree: Andrew Solomon. Parents, Children and the Search for Identity. Highly recommended.

Inner Yoga, Sri Anirvan—This extraordinary book is essential reading for any serious student of Gurdjieff or Yoga practice. Written at a level of both practical and philosophical discourse well above other contemporary work, Anirvan investigates the deep roots of Yoga practice, theory, and philosophy in a deeply sensitive series of insights. Of particular interest is the extraordinary and challenging piece on Buddhi and Buddhiyoga, which examines the questions of practice, life, and death with an acuity rarely encountered in other work of this nature.

Divine Love and Wisdom, Emmanuel Swedenborg. Swedenborg gives us a detailed report on Reality as received from higher sources, reflecting many Truths one would be wise to study carefully. Readers will be astounded by the extraordinary degree of correlation between Swedenborg and Ibn 'Arabi. Many fundamental principles introduced by Gurdjieff are also expounded on in fascinating detail by Swedenborg. All of Swedenborg's works are well worth reading.

The Divine Governance of the Human Kingdom, Ibn 'Arabi. Another real gem, this book ought to be read by every seeker on the spiritual path. If you can only find the time to read one book by Ibn 'Arabi, this ought to be the one. By turns lighthearted, serious, insightful, and ingenius, al 'Arabi introduces us to our inner government character by character, explains their relationships, and indicates how to bring them into a state of harmonious cooperation. Written with love, the book deftly manages to avoid being didactic, delivering instead a sensitive, poetic, and even romantic look at how to organize our inner Being.

The Bezels of Wisdom—Ibn al 'Arabi. A compendium of observations about the nature of "The Reality"—what al 'Arabi calls God— from a 13th century Sufi master. This towering work easily holds its own against—and is worthy of comparison to—13th century masterpieces from other major religious traditions such as Dogen's Shobogenzo and Meister Eckhart's sermons.